It is impossible to know if bees feel anger, but their behavior can be quite aggressive if they sense signs of disturbance or imminent danger to the stability of the nest, and they seem to be able to moderate their responses depending on the nature of the risk they perceive. The risk is highest at the nest, rather than on flowers in fields, which is why most bee stings occur near the nest. Most bees will not sting without some trigger because the consequences can be costly. Depending on the target, stinging may cause the bee's stinger to break off, which results in the bee's death in short order.
Some scientists have described the triggers to many bee behaviors as being dependent on thresholds of response that can change depending upon the bee's age and experience. For example, perhaps only certain bees in the colony would sting a perceived intruder, depending on the bee's age and social role. For those that wouldn't sting, their hypothetical response threshold would be higher, and they would need to feel more threatened before they would react by stinging. The condition of the colony, the local environment, and even the weather can play a role in whether or not a bee will sting. According to Samuel Beshers and Jennifer Fewell, the response threshold idea may also help explain how the honey bee colony is organized by division of labor, so that each bee, depending on the social environment and work to be done, receives signals that either hit or miss their individual threshold level of response for that behavior.
Africanized honey bees are known popularly as "killer bees," although their venom is no more toxic than that of the common European honey bee. They are dangerous because they can be very aggressive when their colony is disturbed and sometimes thousands at a time will sting one victim, flooding the person or animal with multiple doses of venom that can reach highly toxic levels. Although many people can survive an attack like this, it can be lethal to children or physically vulnerable adults.
Killer bees are all hybrids, descendants of twenty-six Tanzanian queen bees, Apis mellifera scutellata, and various strains of European bees with which they have mated. The Tanzanian bees were accidentally released in 1957 from a breeding program in Brazil which was attempting to artificially select for bee traits that would produce more honey and better pollinators in tropical conditions. Prior to the European colonization of North and South America, no honey bees lived in these areas, so we know that any honey bees in Brazil prior to 1957 were of European origin. Since that time, the hybrid bees have moved north through South and Central America and, more recently, into North America.
Mark Winston of Simon Fraser University describes how beekeeping has been affected by these bees and their unique traits: "Indeed, the politics of the Africanized honey bee, and the media attention to it, have caused us to lose sight of the unprecedented success story of an introduced species that is elegantly preadapted to its new environment. The bee is so well suited to tropical life that we have not been able to devise a way to stop or even slow its spread. We marvel at its success in the wild, even as we struggle to blunt its impact on beekeeping and the public." Africanized bees have established themselves in an increasingly wide area of the United States, and at their peak rate of expansion they spread north at a rate of almost a mile or about two kilometers a day.
By 2002, these aggressive bees had been seen to the south in Argentina and to the north as far as Trinidad in the West Indies, Mexico, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and southern California. In June 2005, they were found in southwest Arkansas, and in 2007 they were reported in the New Orleans area. They are said to have caused eleven deaths in Texas in the fifteen years that they have been in the area. They occasionally are seen in northern ports, probably after being transported by ships that move through the Panama Canal. So far, no way has been found to stop their expansion, but regular population monitoring and swarm trapping is conducted by both local and federal government agencies. Africanized bees are not adapted to cold temperatures, so their continued overwintering survival and expansion into northern regions of the United States may be limited.
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